The following is an prophetic excerpt of a letter which then eighteen-year-old Michael Billings sent to a thirteen-year-old younger brother in Christ on the occasion of that younger brother’s birthday.

You have demonstrated honor to your parents and a supreme devotion to Christ and His word. You are as a well plowed field, whose soil has been cultivated, refined, and sown with seed by your Father and Mother all your childhood. You have been given much; and much shall be required of thee (Luke 12:48)....

My exhortation to you is this: Seek ye wisdom while there is yet time (Proverbs 4:7) and then apply this faithful understanding with humility to every aspect of your calling in Christ Jesus. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (I Corinthians 13:11). Now, as a young man, is your greatest opportunity to serve your father, study, implement, reform, apply, and learn to love the Law of God with all of your heart. The seemingly endless morning of youth is now, but the midday is soon come with all the responsibilities of family and business, and before you are even aware the twilight of the ancient will be upon you. Let not your years of spring fall into the chasm of idleness like so many around you. Read the writer of Ecclesiastes, “O young man...walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes, but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment? Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh for childhood and youth are vanity.” And lying in your bed many years from now, an aged and dying man, looking into the grand panoply of the heavens, you will think back to your youth and not be ashamed as the sons of vanity and idleness most assuredly will. It is they who will be heard crying out in the dark of night, in the twilight of their years, “if only I had done more with the time that God gave me, rather then frittering away the most precious years of my life with the silliness of boyhood.” There is no shortage of testimonies of sorrow, when men recollect the days of their youth. The foolish acts that he did... the time that was wasted... the openings of usefulness that he neglected... they that would not get wisdom at the time when their minds were most able to retain it. And now it is too late. There is no time to sit down and learn. Always remember that lost time can never be redeemed. These are the things that build sorrow in a man’s heart when he is in his latter days.

I would again encourage you to heed the hour. There is appointed for you a day to die and no matter how strong and healthy you may seem now, the day of your death may be very near. “You must not boast of tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.” Satan does not care how spiritual your intentions are, or how holy your resolutions are, if only they are determined to be done tomorrow. Your days are but a brief shadow; a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes, a story that is soon to be told. This life is but leaves in the wind; here for an instant and then flees with the rouse of a tempest. It is but a vapor...

Night is Falling.... You must seize the day.

With friendship and brotherly love,

Michael G. Billings